


Caught In The Undertow

by snurgle



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Body Horror, Drowning, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Hallucinations, Horror, Human/Monster Romance, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, PLEASE read the author note content warnings before each chapter, Psychological Horror, Slow Burn, Surreal, Surreal horror, The Author Regrets Everything, The Distortion But What If They Were Mermaids This Time, content warnings are at the bottom of every author note, mermaid au, should probably mention the drowning, siren au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:28:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26576026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snurgle/pseuds/snurgle
Summary: Being a creature of the Spiral has its complications. When a nameless creature impulsively rescues a stranger who's immune to his song, he does not think about the past or future. Consequences do not exist to him. Now he can't find his way back to the life he lived before.One night, Gerry meets an odd stranger who is the furthest thing from normal that he can imagine. The Eye is giving him no choice but to find out what he is and where he came from.Helen's best and only friend has just disappeared without warning. She has to find him, for the sake of her own sanity.They are all threads woven into the same tapestry, but the picture it makes isn't clear yet. As far as the final thoughts of mortal beings go, "Is that a mermaid?" is pretty insignificant.
Relationships: Annabelle Cane/Helen Richardson, Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley, Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion, Helen Richardson & Michael Shelley
Comments: 18
Kudos: 44





	1. Her Lost Shaker Of Salt

**Author's Note:**

> **Hello. Please for the love of everything, read this note before you read this story. Content warnings are at the bottom.**
> 
> Okay. We're trying this again. If you saw when I posted this last time, welcome back. It's good to see you here again.  
> So we're exactly back where we started in August. This story that I posted, then became so ashamed of it that I deleted it the next day. I don't want to be sloppy or thoughtless. This is the first long-form work I've attempted to make in almost 2 years. If I manage to hold out and finish it... that's a game of chance.  
> I figure maybe I should explain myself. I wanted this story to be as original a take on the Mermaid AU trope as possible. As a result, this ended up being a REALLY heavy piece of work, and is **DEFINITELY** not suitable for all audiences. This thing is, at its core, a surreal horror story. I got extremely nervous about the subject matter and the directions I planned to take some elements of the plot, and basically decided this whole anxious mess wasn't worth my time and trashed the project. Over time, some irl events caused me to want to revive it. I don't want to overexplain here, but basically I somehow re-convinced myself that this chance was worth taking.
> 
> Please know that I would never want to unintentionally hurt anyone with something I created. I tried to be as forthcoming with the tags as I possibly could. If this story is not something you want to see, or if anything happens later on that causes you distress, you are free to abandon this story at any time. I will understand. 
> 
> Now. If you're still here, I'm assuming you've read the tags. If not, scroll up and read them now, for your own safety. I have further explaining to do.  
> I understand that with the release of MAG 167, the main relationship explored in this story has fallen out of favor with a large part of the fandom. I am caught up with the podcast, and I completely understand why people have responded the way they did. They have every right to their feelings and actions, and if I'm honest, I'm pretty fucking ashamed that I couldn't drop this ship the way many other people in the fandom did. I tried. I genuinely did. But in the end, a cheap source of serotonin won out against every fiber of logic my brain had to offer, and that's landed us where we are today. You reading this note, me writing this horrible story. So I'll clarify a handful of things regarding the can of worms that is GerryMichael.  
> I first came up with the idea for this story several months prior to the release of MAG 167, based on timeline information that was established in the earlier seasons of the podcast. The author has kindly admitted that MAG 167 establishes plot details that retcon the earlier timeline, which was a mistake on his part (I get it, dude. Writing is hard.). To my understanding, he's left the timeline open to fans' interpretation, and I've decided to stick with the earlier timeline, since that was the one that I got attached to and the one which makes the most sense to me. As I understand it, Michael Shelley was hired by the archives sometime in the mid-2000s and got Distorted sometime around 2012. In my interpretation, Gerry and Michael are relatively the same age, with Michael being maybe 2-3 years older than him _at most_. The relationship portrayed in this story will not involve the age gap that arose from MAG 167 and the handful of canon details established shortly before its release. I have written both Gerry and Michael in their early 30s, and both are consistently adults throughout the entirety of this story. I **do not support** p3d0ph1lia, gr00m1ng, or relationships with creepy age gaps in any capacity. This story **will not contain** any of these mentioned elements, and if this is the kind of thing that you're into, I will have to kindly ask you to get the fuck off my page and never interact with my stories again.
> 
> Now that that's out of the way, I should probably break out the actual **CONTENT WARNINGS** for this chapter.  
> So. **CONTENT WARNINGS.**  
>  This story starts out heavy right away. Warnings for ALCOHOL USE, discussions of marital infidelity, implied sexual content, and surreal horror elements including HALLUCINATIONS and BODY HORROR. There isn't any GORE in the traditional sense, but the body horror elements can produce a similar effect. Basically, if the words "bone turning to ash" disturb you, I'll kindly suggest that you sit this one out. Also, DROWNING. It seems pretty important that I mention the DROWNING in this chapter, because there is quite a lot of DROWNING.
> 
> I hope you all paid attention. And I hope you all understand where I'm coming from, and where this story may or may not take us. So far I haven't even finished a second chapter. Updates probably won't be consistent, and it's unclear whether I'll finish this thing at all. Nothing to do but move forward and give it a shot, I guess.

The air on the observation deck was thick with the smells of tequila and salt. Speakers fixed to the ceiling blasted out some top-40 hit that didn’t have a name worth remembering. Lights spun across the polished wood of the dance floor and saturated the night with spirals of color. In all her life, Helen Richardson had never felt so drunk.

She was not a stranger to intoxication. Lately, she’d been getting in touch with the feeling of it rather frequently. The last five nights were so unexceptional that she may as well have considered being shitfaced her new normal. It could be, as long as she was on vacation. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. God knew she needed this now more than she ever did. 

What _was_ strange to Helen was being alone on a vacation that was meant to be celebrating her and her husband’s twentieth anniversary. 

She leaned heavily against the bar and her hand tightened around the stem of a half-empty margarita glass. It had been her own terrible idea to put herself in this awkward position in the first place. At the time, she couldn’t have imagined she would ever come to regret her decision. All she remembered about the night she made this harebrained plan was how angry she’d been. 

Looking back on it, she should have noticed that something was off about Patrick years ago. She _had_ known that _something_ was wrong, but could never sort out exactly what it was. When her husband first started growing cold and distant, she’d gone inward, wondering which of her own flaws might have been driving a wedge between them. She’d tried to take all the blame onto herself, if only to gain some miniscule shred of control over the situation. If everything was her fault, then at least it could be within her power to fix it. At first she thought she wasn’t making enough time for him. When that didn’t fix anything, she thought he was getting bored with sex and wanted to try something new. Every change and suggestion she made only seemed to repulse him. 

Slowly the options had worn away until Helen found herself wound up in the fear that Patrick simply didn’t love her anymore. She’d known for ages that she was no longer the whimsical, starry-eyed girl she’d been when they first got together. He’d never held back on reminding her of that either, the fucking prick. 

Somewhere down the bar, Helen’s eyes drifted to the bright silver earrings of a younger woman, polished metal blinking with the colors of the dance floor. She couldn’t have been much older than Helen had been when she and Patrick had first met. Even her clothes looked nearly the same. Her breezy lace-trimmed blouse was painfully trite, exactly like the one Helen had once worn to a _Macbeth_ audition. There had been a monologue she’d memorized for that one. It wasn’t from the same play, though, which might have been half the reason the director hadn’t cast her.

Helen watched the strange woman for a while, wondering if she was alone. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention to any of the people around her, and there was no drink in her hand, but there was something in the set of her face and her posture that made it look like she was waiting for someone. Her glitter-lined eyes were wide and attentive, tirelessly scanning the crowd. For how eager she seemed, nobody appeared to meet her. Helen began to wonder if it wasn’t anyone specific she was waiting for. Maybe it was the _possibility_ of someone that was keeping her here. Helen knew the feeling. For how still she was, she felt it curling restlessly in her chest; the hunger for possibility, for hope, for the simple comfort of _not always being alone_.

What was the line from that monologue? Something something, pretty sweeting... It was so long ago, she could hardly remember, and the tequila filtering through her brain wasn’t making things any easier. Journeys end in lovers meeting. That was it, the part she had _really_ wanted to say, the reason she’d chosen that monologue in the first place. She traced her lips along the rim of her margarita glass, tasting the salt as she studied the stranger across the bar. The overhead lights dyed the scene pink. Her heart twitched hopefully behind her ribs. 

_Journeys end in lovers meeting_.

Almost as soon as the honeyed words crossed her mind, Helen saw the woman’s face break out into a smile. She raised a hand, waving frantically to someone Helen couldn’t see. It was only then that Helen saw the glimmer of a ring on the woman’s finger. A man appeared from the crowd and the woman squealed with laughter as he pulled her into his arms. Helen felt a stab of disappointment, and a second later it was replaced by disgust, both at them and at herself, quickly filling the wound with an antiseptic burn. Newlyweds, probably on their honeymoon. She could tell from their age, and from the looks of stupid joy on their faces. They were both so dumb and pretty, and they _had_ to be rich if they were on a cruise like this. They could smile and laugh and touch each other drunkenly like people who didn’t know how it felt to be hurt. Neither of them knew what kind of torture lay ahead. But out of the two of them, Helen pitied the bride far more. She tried not to speculate how long they would last before her husband started to get bored and turned back to her margarita instead.

 _Journeys end in lovers meeting_. Fuck that. No, they didn’t.

She’d been trying to make a name for herself in acting when she and Patrick had first met. She’d been fresh out of art school, he’d just graduated from some highbrow technical institute. Being a real estate agent was only supposed to be a part-time day job, something to keep her afloat until her career took off. When they started living together, Patrick had taken it upon himself to be the stable one between them; he held things together, content to watch Helen chase her dreams. At least until he got tired of watching. Then came the criticisms, the teasing that always tended to go a little too far, the small, cutting suggestions of “well, if it hasn’t happened by now, maybe it just isn’t going to happen at all.” It didn’t help that by the time he cracked down on her, she was on the precipice of turning twenty-seven. Her talent could only get her so far, and her beauty wasn’t going to last forever. Her time to achieve stardom was running short. Or Patrick was very good at making it sound that way, every time Helen came back dejected from another failed audition.

The song faded out and turned into a new one, just as loud, popular and unmemorable as the last. Helen glanced back up from her drink just in time to see the man pulling his giggling new wife off her barstool and sweeping her out onto the dance floor. She wasn’t sure who she hated more in that moment: the two of them for having the audacity to be happy in front of her, or herself for thinking that way at all. 

In retrospect, Helen had no idea what kind of stupid impulse had driven her to marry Patrick. He had always been a bit mean, even if never in a way that felt like he _really_ intended to hurt her. She hoped he didn’t. Either way, it wasn’t until she’d married him that Patrick had announced his plan to quit his programming job and start his own software company. By then, Helen had already made her decision to abandon acting completely. She’d pretended to have her own reasons for it, but she knew the truth at her core, even back then. Patrick didn’t laugh at the idea of Helen being a full-time real estate agent, and that was all that had really mattered..

So she’d thrown away her own aspirations to support his. Another thing she maybe should have seen coming, and that she’d willingly ignored. It was after his company started seeing real success that the problems arose. Helen understood now that it was entirely his fault. 

For ages, _ages_ , she’d sensed something was wrong, but could never sort out what it was. In the end, it had taken her all of ten years to figure it out.

Patrick’s passwords took quite some time to guess, but Helen had managed it. While he was away in California, doing god-knew-what at some tech moguls’ convention for an entire week, she had kept herself busy combing through his entire sordid history. She hadn’t even known there _were_ this many hookup apps in existence, let alone that all of them could be used at once by a single man. And what she found likely didn’t even cover the full scope of it. 

No wonder he’d lost interest in her so suddenly after they married. Given the ages of the various other women he’d slept with over the years, Patrick was clearly the type who believed all of a woman’s sex appeal came to an abrupt end as soon as she turned 30.

He was wrong, of course. Last night had proven that in abundance. For all the subtle discouragements that life with Patrick had ground into her, Helen’s senses were starting to come back to her. When she was alone, she knew she was beautiful. Her warm bronze skin was as smooth and soft as it ever was; she’d always had a talent for keeping it clear. The laughter lines in her face emphasized her full lips, high cheekbones and piercing hazel eyes. Even at 42, her long, dense mane of mahogany curls had yet to show any streaks of grey. The night before Patrick was due to return from California, standing half-dressed in front of the full-length mirror in her closet door, she realized that she no longer needed to care what her husband thought. Afterward, when she sat down at his laptop to scroll one more time through thread after thread of illicit messages, her anger fueled all over again... that was when she came up with the genius plan that had landed her here.

 _Here_ was a top-deck nightclub of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship in the middle of the north Atlantic, currently on a course for Nova Scotia, then south to New York City, Key Largo into Cuba and Barbados after that, and an array of other places until the ship circled the entire Atlantic over the course of six weeks. She’d been sailing for five days, and Patrick was thousands of miles away. Yet no matter how far out of sight he was, Helen couldn’t stop her husband from creeping back into her mind. 

If she had thought to invade his privacy just a little sooner, the revelation of the _real_ state of their relationship probably wouldn’t have hurt nearly so much. It was her own fault for letting his lies drag themselves out, waiting so long and letting this wound fester. Being together for twenty years was supposed to mean something significant. A sign of success, or undying romance, or something else along those lines. To have that cover ripped away, to find out all at once that almost her entire adult life had been nothing but one big, ugly pile of deceptions stacked on top of one another... well.

After she found him out, she spent one day in a state of total disbelief, then the next two sinking into delirious panic, reeling for hours on end over what had become of her life. Then came the night in front of the bedroom mirror, when she finally got a good look at herself for the first time in years and decided what she was going to do next. 

Patrick acted so pleased when he came home from his business trip to find Helen in the dining room with a dry martini in each hand. A romantic candlelit dinner wasn’t nearly as lavish an anniversary gift as the cruise tickets he’d bought with his ridiculous CEO’s salary. He smiled for her anyway, though she could see the deadened look returning to his eyes already, the same one he always had when he was home. And she smiled back, especially as she watched him finishing one mixed drink after another. 

It had taken her all night to figure out where to buy tranquilizers without a prescription. He was still fast asleep when she left the next morning with one suitcase and both their boarding passes folded neatly into her pocket. She threw his in the trash on the way through the gate. 

Now she was here, who-knew-how-many drinks deep, leaned up against this sticky bar in a sunset-colored evening dress that she didn’t know why she was still wearing. It was late, maybe 2 or 3 in the morning; she would have known if she’d bothered to glance at a clock at any point. This was the first night of the cruise that she’d stayed out this late. If she’d had the mind to do it that night, she could have caught some stranger’s attention and convinced them to follow her back to her cabin by now.

She still could, she thought, if she really felt like it. And maybe she did. Anything would have been better than the hot, sour discomfort that had taken up residence in her gut. She downed another mouthful of tequila and lime, trying to numb it, but tonight alcohol was doing nothing to help. Failing that, maybe a little human contact would set her right. Or it wouldn’t. Helen couldn’t be sure until she tried, but she was no longer sure that she even wanted to. The woman with the silver earrings had been nothing more than a second-long fantasy, one which had quickly turned into a lost cause. Maybe the whole night was, and she should give up and return to her cabin. No matter what thoughts crossed her mind, she couldn’t convince her leaden body to leave the space it occupied.

Helen turned around and leaned her back against the bar, staring out at the distorted shapes of bodies dancing on the polished wood floor. She considered joining them, then worried she might end up getting sick after all she’d drunk that night and decided against it. After all, this was going to be a long cruise, and she only had so many evening dresses. And why, _why_ the hell was she still wearing this one? Why had she bothered putting it on and going to dinner at all? It was bad enough, the scene she’d left behind, but being alone on an anniversary cruise made it all so much worse. 

The first few days had been fantastic, just as she’d predicted they would be. She’d bought a handful of new outfits for the vacation, thinking at the time that it was only right for an occasion like this. Most of them had included cardigans, shrugs, leggings and other little tokens of dowdy, middle-aged modesty, but after she found out about Patrick, she made the executive decision to leave all those depressing accessories at home. The first night, she walked proudly into the dining room, feeling more free and gorgeous than she had since university. After that had come the tacky 70s-themed night club on the fourth level of the ship, dancing the night away without a care in the world. The performance had repeated every night until the trip across the Atlantic became a blurred progression of drinking, dancing and rolling lazily out of bed to do it all over again. 

Then came last night. Day four of the trip. The sixth-floor karaoke lounge, a woman in a sequined miniskirt who sat a little too close, one bare knee nudging Helen’s through the slit in her dress. Being just a little too drunk, a little too bold. Her hand lingered on Helen’s hip. They were giggling and clinging to each other like schoolgirls as they stumbled down the hall toward Helen’s cabin. 

By morning she was gone, and Helen woke up alone on the fifth day of her trip with the sudden awareness of where she was and why she was there. 

The ship would reach Halifax tomorrow, and Helen knew it would only be a matter of time before the cruise ended and they would be docking in London again. Maybe Patrick couldn’t reach her now, thousands of miles away with no cell service to speak of, but this vacation would not last forever. Sooner or later, she would have to come back to him. And when she did... _fuck_ , when she did...

Helen drowned the unfinished thought with the rest of her margarita. The bitterness of liquor cut through the sugar and lime, and she coughed as she set the glass down on the bar and slid it away. She looked around for a distraction. Somewhere down at the other end of the bar, colored light glinted off a spray of sequins she thought she recognized. Her eyes followed the shape of a curvy, sunburnt leg up to a wavy curtain of auburn hair. She vaguely recalled those wine-red lips leaving smears of color all over her neck.

It took too long for Helen to realize she was staring. The woman from the karaoke lounge had met her eyes, and she was smiling. She picked up her piña colada and started to approach, a coy and intentional look in her eyes. With a lurch, Helen realized she didn’t remember her name. In fact, after the night they’d had, she hadn’t intended to ever cross paths with her again. And yet, here she was, right in front of her hardly a day later, and Helen took a second to berate herself for forgetting just how small the world of a cruise ship really is.

She briefly considered running, but by then, it was too late. Karaoke woman was already settling onto the barstool next to her. “It must be my lucky night,” she purred. “Lovely to see you again, Helen.”

Helen’s name rolled off her tongue like cherry syrup. Already she felt a dull weight of shame welling up in her chest. “Hello,” she numbly replied. 

“Where have you been all this time?” karaoke woman asked. “It feels like ages since we last saw each other.”

“It hasn’t been,” Helen said, sounding twice as confident as she felt, and even then, her voice still shivered.

“I know, but I like to think time moves a little differently when you’re on vacation.” Karaoke woman studied some spot just below Helen’s face through a fringe of false lashes. “I hoped you hadn’t decided to jump ship or anything after I left. I really _did_ want to see you again.”

“Do I strike you as that type of person who would do that?”

Karaoke woman shrugged. “You never know. I try not to judge people before I really know them.” She took a slow, languid sip of her drink, keeping her eyes fixed on Helen. “You feeling alright, dove? You look a bit punchy.”

 _Dove_. The pet name was like a bullet punching directly through Helen’s chest. She felt an uncomfortable twist in her nerves and said, “I think I drank a bit too much.”

“Oh, of course. Poor dear.” Karaoke woman raised a hand to gently stroke her manicured fingertips over Helen’s arm, letting them linger there as she raised a hand to signal the bartender over. “Oi. Can we get a glass of water, when you have a moment?”

“You don’t have to do this,” Helen mumbled. 

“ _Someone_ should.” Again, that soft, playful drag of nails over Helen’s skin. It was all Helen could do not to rip her arm away from the woman’s hand. She pulled back slowly, pinning her elbow against her side and letting her hand settle in her lap, where she was sure not even karaoke woman would be bold enough to reach for it. Unfortunately, that was enough to make the woman look at her, a slight pout to her deep red lips, a line of concern etched into her forehead. “Helen, are you _sure_ you’re alright?”

“I’m fine,” Helen insisted. “I think I should just go back to my cabin.”

“Okay. I can walk you.”

Helen paused, raising her eyebrows, like that had even been a bold thing to offer. Given the circumstances, maybe it was. 

“No.”

The word came out with a weird inflection, not quite decisive, but not really a question either. Even Helen wasn’t sure how it was meant to sound. Whatever more there was to say, it didn’t matter; she was sliding off her barstool already. 

Right away, karaoke woman’s face took on a look of shock. “Oh... Wait, no, Helen. I didn’t mean it like that.” She reached out that same soft hand. “I’m not trying to be presumptuous or anything. You just... You looked like you weren’t having the best time, dove.”

Helen stared at where her hands rested on the edge of the bar, refusing to meet her eyes. “You _really_ don’t have to do this,” she repeated.

“I want to.”

Helen had to look at her then. The expression on her face was painfully earnest, eyes fastened to Helen’s face with the same sickly, unrestrained sweetness as her voice. It would be easy, she thought, to give her what she wanted. It was just another night of Helen’s attention. Which, she knew, would become another thing to own up to when this vacation inevitably ended. Numbly, she pulled her arm back, turned away and slipped into the crowd that clogged the dance floor.

“Helen, wait–” karaoke woman called after her, but she was already gone.

Bodies pressed in against her from all sides, and she could barely stay upright on her high heels as she swam through the ocean of people. They shoved and jostled and grasped at her with unseen hands until at last she breached the other side and stumbled out to the edge of the deck. One nameless song on the speakers shifted imperceptibly into another one, even heavier with bass, and the rhythm of it pounded like a migraine against the inside of Helen’s skull. The night’s worth of alcohol felt like a puddle of needles in her stomach, and she felt the onset of a hangover already starting to creep up her throat. She was grasping the railing, staring out over the water, but that was still too close to the music. Too close to _her_ , especially (whoever she was, whatever she thought existed between them). Helen needed to get away, to be alone, preferably somewhere quiet. With darkness blurring her vision, she started to walk. 

The railing of the observation deck was wet with mist as she ran her hand along its waxy surface. The spray of the ocean rose right up off the waves at night, showering over whoever happened to be outside without cover. Saltwater dusted Helen’s curls and tickled her face. She brought a hand up to wipe it from her eyes, and her fingertips came away smeared with mascara. There was a weary tightness in her throat, clogging her nose. Was she crying? When had that happened? 

At last there was a bend in the railing, turning a corner to denote the back of the ship, and Helen was far enough from the bar that the loud, thumping music had faded to indistinct background noise. She sighed and leaned her elbows against the railing, letting her head fall into her hands. She’d had _far_ too much to drink that night. The best thing she could do right then was make good on the line she’d fed to karaoke woman: give in to the demands of her sore, tired body, go back to her cabin and sleep it off. And she would have, if her cabin didn’t happen to be the very last place she wanted to be.

That fucking cabin, that had two of _everything_ in it. The king-sized bed that felt unsettlingly empty when she laid down in it alone. The bottles of champagne and fucking _heart-shaped boxes of chocolates_ that the staff left every time they came in to clean, which had all been part of the specialty package that Patrick had ordered when he booked their tickets. Beyond that, the couple’s massages she went to alone. The appointment with the photographer that she’d had to cancel. Worst of all was the empty chair that sat across from her every time she went to the main dining room in the evenings, and the card that perched on the table in front of it, announcing _Patrick Richardson_ in neat serif font. Even though she’d left her husband behind, this cruise seemed dead-set on reminding Helen of him at every possible turn. And remembering him reminded her that someday, this vacation was going to end, and she was going to have to face him. 

The thought pierced through her with more clarity now than it ever had before. A sob boiled over in her chest as her nerves wound themselves tight with fear. There was no telling what her husband would do to get back at her for this. Because he would, she _knew_ he would. She may have thought her life was already ruined, but since she’d married him, Patrick had become a rich and powerful man. There were surely things he could do to her that were much worse than his infidelity. So, _so_ much worse than that.

It was about then that Helen heard someone singing. 

As the sound of it reached her ears, her breath lodged in her throat. Her tears stopped as if someone had flipped a switch, and she looked up, staring out at the shimmering expanse of the ocean. The horizon was empty and dark, save for flashes of light where the clear, glowing moon reflected off the waves. But there was something out there. Someone? Whatever it was, it was singing, and Helen was so perplexed by it that she felt she had no choice but to stand there and listen. 

The singer had a strange voice, unlike any Helen had heard before. She couldn’t tell what kind of creature it belonged to. It was almost human, but at the same time didn’t sound human at all. Its timbre was high and airy, reminding her of the sonar noises of some marine creature, maybe a whale or dolphin, but she couldn’t seem to decide which. The sound felt more complex than that, though, and the longer she listened, the more facets Helen found in it. The voice was less like a single one, more like many layered on top of each other until they blended into a single, indecipherable thing, some parts natural and whistling like the wind, some parts synthetic, leaving a metallic ring echoing in Helen’s ears. And it was definitely, undeniably _singing_. The notes lilted and wandered in a weird, almost tuneless way, but as one tone bled into another, the sound of it circled around itself until it became a melody. It wasn’t one Helen could make sense of, but it was a melody all the same.

It was coming from out on the water. It had to be, because some instinct buried deep in Helen’s subconscious assured her that nothing on the ship was capable of making a sound like this. She leaned against the railing, bleary eyes staring out at the horizon, listening. The singer had to be out there somewhere. She needed to see what it was, needed to know what kind of creature made such an odd and enchanting sound, but as she searched the water’s surface for any signs of movement, she saw nothing but the flash of moonlight on the waves. Slowly, the patches of light began to smear together.

Helen’s eyes closed, and she was briefly aware of nothing but her breath as it squeezed in and out through her running nose. The song seeped into her awareness, coiled up inside her ears and twisted into the folds of her brain. The backs of her eyelids bloomed with tie-dye swirls of color, and when her eyes opened again, she felt herself drifting away from the railing. Her shoes left the floor and she couldn’t feel the straining curve of her feet over her high heels anymore. Her dress wound around her legs, clinging feebly to her skin as mist soaked through the layers of chiffon. The song was sticky like nectar on her skin, its melody winding around her waist and limbs like an affectionate eel. She could almost run her fingers through it and pick apart its colorful strands like it was a braid of yarn. Every sound was so bright and vibrant, and they were pulling at her, curling up and beckoning over and over until–

“Helen!”

Helen blinked, and her eyes snapped abruptly back into focus. She saw the deep dark sky, the moon and the glistening sea below it. The colors were gone. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

That was a voice that she knew. It was shouting from behind her. She turned around and saw karaoke woman standing just a few meters away. She was tense, her eyes wide, her face paled in horror. Helen didn’t understand why at first. Then her ankle twisted underneath her, and she looked down to see that she was standing on the railing. 

Then she slipped, and she wasn’t standing anymore.

The last thing Helen saw was karaoke woman rushing towards her, hands outstretched, a scream ripping free from her painted lips before the roar of wind filled Helen’s ears and the world around her turned into a rushing, dissonant blur. She fell backwards, off the railing and over the water, and then she was tumbling, her body twisting around in random directions, trying to right itself only to keep on falling. Helen had just enough time for the terror of impact to freeze in her veins before her body met the water with a frigid _splash_. 

Cold ocean surged up around her, and for a moment, everything was quiet. Darkness surrounded her, and the salt of it burned her open eyes. She squinted them closed, but couldn’t block out the stinging pain that was already there. Her bones ached, her whole body complaining for how far it had fallen. Still she flailed, kicking her legs and clawing at the water, trying to find her way to the surface. 

Somewhere in the distance, she heard the voice again. A single shrill note speared through the water and skewered her ears like a long, thin scalpel of sound. Helen’s mouth opened to scream, and saltwater rushed in. She choked, her cry of pain fluttering up toward the surface in a few useless bubbles. The first note slid down into another, and Helen’s senses started to go sideways. Colors blotted her vision, colors that didn’t belong in the dark, empty ocean. The weak light of the moon twisted into patterns above her head. She reached out and kicked desperately, trying with all her strength to swim towards it.

The song climbed up and shattered in a shrill peak of sound, and just like that, her head had breached the surface. Helen coughed and took in a deep, grateful gasp of air. Somewhere in the distance, she saw the hulking shape of the cruise ship, farther away than it should have been. How long ago had she fallen? She couldn’t seem to remember. The flash of colored lights on the observation deck bled into the night, and she could still hear that same insignificant pop music swimming in her ears. She stared swimming towards it, trying to focus, grasping at any little thing that might let her get a hold of herself. The name of the artist, the name of the song, _anything_. Then something wrapped around her leg.

 _Katy Perry_ , she thought for no reason as a sharp tug on her ankle swiftly dragged her underwater.

The bleary, bass-filled melody followed her into the strangling darkness, cut through by the kaleidoscopic voice that sang all around her and refused to stop. Her eyes clamped shut against the salt, and fractals whirled into existence behind her eyelids. She tried to right herself, to remember which way was up and find the surface again, but something in the water was stopping her. An impossible current pulled her deeper and spun her around, her body pirouetting her against her will in some kind of senseless ballet. The more she struggled, it seemed, the deeper she went. Her lungs burned. Water squeezed tight around her chest, the fear humming in her veins urging her to scream again, but she held her mouth firmly closed against it. The surface was nowhere in sight. It had been gone for so long that Helen barely remembered what air tasted like anymore. She struggled to swim for it anyway. She didn’t want to die. She _didn’t_.

But that song was wrapped around her skull, and it was crushing her. Her hands stopped paddling and clutched at her head instead, fingers clawed into her hair. Her dress felt so heavy as it bloomed around her, fabric drinking in all the saltwater it could and dragging her further down. The song wore away at her, and she could barely feel her legs, even as she kicked them with fiery desperation. The ocean tightened its grip, and if she didn’t scream now, her lungs would definitely burst. Tears stabbed at the corners of her closed eyes, and her eyelids peeled open along with her lips, the raw, the straining pressure of her breath escaping her mouth in a weak stream of bubbles. She reached for them with her fingers, trying to remember which way the surface even was, but just as soon as they’d left her mouth, she lost them. In the distance, she spied a flash of something as it passed through a patch of moon.

Helen blinked, and her eyes struggled to focus between the darkness, the salt and the song that twisted her vision. Something in the water. She could feel its presence on every last one of her nerves. It was the thing that was singing, it must have been, and she could feel it pulling on her mind as it circled her like a blood-sniffing shark. Its voice sliced through her body, cutting her senses into ribbons, and she could barely feel herself anymore. Her head was drifting away, dragged along in the grasp of that weird, formless thing that just kept on singing, never changing its song, never even pausing to breathe. 

Her heart pounded at her sore ribs, her lungs begging her to breathe out again. She tried to fight against it, but she could only hold out for so long before she cracked again and the last air in her lungs abandoned her, leaving a vacuum in her chest. She twitched there, weightless, suspended and dizzy in the swaying void of the ocean, her mouth hanging open and waiting for another breath that was never going to come. A smear of color danced distantly in front of her eyes. Then, as she stared, it took a shape. 

Helen hadn’t been able to imagine what it would look like when she heard its voice. But in the strangest way, when she finally caught a glimpse of the thing that sang to her, it made perfect sense. It moved towards her slowly, its long, slender body twisting through the water with a weird, erratic grace. The way it swam didn’t look right at all; everything about it was too fluid, too smooth, and Helen half expected that any second it would melt away and disappear from sight. But even as her eyes focused in and out and acrid colors ate away at the edges of her vision, the shape of it held together. There was a flash of scales, a flicker of translucent fins. Then a face floated in front of her, round and pale as the moon, and pinned her with a pair of wide, hungry grey eyes. 

Helen choked, and a mouthful of water fled into her throat, intent on finding her lungs. Distantly, she was aware that she was thinking something. There was a word for what was in front of her, but she couldn’t remember it. As her mind scrambled and grabbed for it, it kept slipping away.

The thing circled around her, its song winding tighter around her brain. She felt that pull again, a persistent tug that ran down her spine and across her nerves. No, that wasn’t quite right. Not a pull. It was _sucking_ , sucking like the mouth of a feeding leech, a sandpaper tongue ripping away the skin of her psyche and burrowing holes into everything it could reach. It drained, and for a few seconds at a time she felt _less_ , before the fear welled up again and filled the cavities it left and the thing came back to drink from her again. 

She fought the drift that was steadily hacking at her mind and shattering it into confetti, but it was growing stronger as the last dregs of oxygen faded from her body. The creature passed through her vision again, closer this time. It watched her from the corner of its eye, and she watched it back, flowing like mercury across her line of sight. A pale shoulder, a silver fin along the ridge of a spine. A _hand_ , what should have been a hand. It was the right shape, but the fingers were all wrong. They skittered along in the water, like all the bones that didn’t quite exist in the rest of its body had gathered there, turning its fingers into long, sharp, grasping things with thin membranes of web stretched between them. Then its long, flexible tail slid past. Prismatic scales glimmered in front of her eyes and sent free-floating sparks dancing across her vision. As all remains of sense disappeared from Helen, she found herself thinking that it almost looked beautiful.

Finally the word she’d been searching for came to her. As far as final thoughts go, _Is that a mermaid?_ felt pretty insignificant. 

Then the song closed in on her at last. The black hole of the creature’s hunger drank and drank and drank from her, and she felt her consciousness being split, shredded and pulled tight. It ran its fingers through her mind like a bow across violin strings. With a sudden burst of pain, they snapped all at once, and Helen saw and felt everything in her fall to pieces.

All her memories unwound like a string of tangled fairy lights, and the song was picking through them with long, sharp fingers, scraping at everything it could reach. It slithered like a worm into the crevices of her mind and licked up every last drop of pain that it could find. She watched her own thoughts unraveling with the song, ripping into nonexistence as one thread after another ran out. Art school. Patrick. Giving up. Ennui. Emptiness. Deception. Denial. Betrayal. Her own lies, trying to patch up the wounds that his had left. All the tears and tequila that had landed her here. _Here_ was the open ocean in the dead of night, and she could no longer remember having ever been anywhere else.

And suddenly, Helen was back in her body. The song had gone silent, and the creature was floating in front her again, its face uncomfortably close, searching her face with its big, watchful eyes. It brought one hand up to cup its palm around her cheek, trapping her in its gaze with its illogical fingers tangled up in her hair. Its other hand was wrapped around her wrist, clinging to it with a sharp, insistent pressure. From this close, she could see the way its irises twisted, strands of muscle winding around in twin whirlpools of grey, staring out at her from a face that expressed some emotion she no longer knew how to read.

Helen stared blankly back at it. She knew, at her core, that she was dying. Even if this thing let her go now, she wouldn’t make it to the surface. The mermaid had taken all it could from her, leaving behind only a small, smoldering ember of fear that was rooted deep in her chest. It held all the knowledge of what she knew was coming next. The weight and heat of it terrified her. 

With her last flickers of consciousness, Helen thought, _I don’t want to die._

 _What was that?_ something else thought in reply.

She felt it pressing inwards, the mermaid’s hunger still rooting through her even though there was nothing left for it to take. It was inside of her just as much as it was in front of her, grasping her arm and looking into her eyes. She could no longer draw the lines between herself and it. Not knowing what else to do, she thought again. _Yes. Yes, I’m sure. I don’t want to die._

_I can help you not die._

_Help me._

_Promise to stay with me if I do?_

_Please please yes anything else but this. I will stay. I don’t want to die._

The creature pulled itself close and wound its long, lithe body around hers as it began to sing again. This song was different, sharper somehow, tearing at Helen in a way that was completely new and entirely worse. Her brain collapsed and imploded inside her skull. Everything in and around her lost its composure, and with a white-hot shriek of pain, her body started to change. Helen’s head fell back and her jaw wrenched open in a scream of mindless anguish. Water surged into her mouth and filled her lungs. Bone turned to ash and skin frayed like fabric, pieces peeling apart and rearranging. A sunset-colored evening dress fell away from a fleshy thing that no longer had enough of a shape to wear it. Then, with a quick and violent twisting of everything she had once been, Helen Richardson ceased to exist.

* * *

What was now in her place came together slowly, sensations smudging into one another as each new piece learned what it was, what it did and felt. She shook her head, stretched and blinked her hazy new eyes. Her fingers combed through the water, and she gave her tail a few experimental flicks. It was a powerful thing, driving her forward through the water, directly into the creature in front of her. 

He nudged her back with his forehead, and she could see his face again. He looked at her with a foggy sort of recognition. There was a quick, wordless exchange between them. He smiled.

_You are me now._

_I am you?_

_Yes, we are, Helen._

Helen swam up against him and lashed her slim, flexible body around his, pressing her face into his halo of long blonde hair. He nuzzled her back, and the two of them twined around each other, something abstract binding them together like a live, tangible thing. Thin filaments of it stretched between them when they separated again. He turned, nodding in the direction of something that Helen couldn’t remember all that clearly. She certainly felt like it was something important. She dwelled on it, concentrating, and a handful of blurry, indistinct facts settled into her head. There was a ship. There were people on it. She’d been one of them once, but she wasn’t anymore.

And she needed something. She wasn’t sure what, but she needed it. There was a quiet tension drawing up inside of her, a strain on her being that she didn’t recognize. It gnawed at her, and she looked to her new companion, wondering if he had an answer. He swam close and nudged her forward before pulling ahead with a few strokes of his tail. He glanced back, waiting for her to catch up. 

_You’re new to this_ , he told her. _You need to learn how to feed._

Helen quickly swam after him. She couldn’t wait to get started.

  
  



	2. Loose Evidence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. I'll try and make this quick.  
> I want to thank everyone who's interacted with this story so far, who left kudos, and more than anything, who bothered leaving comments. You have no idea how much it means to me. Validation from strangers on the internet is probably the only thing that's giving me the energy to continue working on this thing. Please, keep talking. I like your words.  
> Thanks again to my three whole beta readers, Noot, cicada_s and ghostlyfemslash, because I'm insecure enough about this horror I've created. I don't think I'd have it in me to post it if there was nobody holding my hand while I struggle to edit it. You're all so kind and I would die for you any time, anywhere, for any reason.  
> Does this chapter need **CONTENT WARNINGS**? Who am I kidding. I put them before every chapter. They always need to be here.  
>  **CONTENT WARNING** for SMOKING, mention of BRAIN TUMORS, a brief instance of PAINKILLER USE, and most importantly, HARM TO AN ANIMAL near the end of the chapter. It isn't graphic or gory, and the animal doesn't die, but there's still a very high chance that people will not like it.  
> I think that's about it. Read. Or don't. I don't make the rules around here.

When Gertrude told him that he’d be going on holiday soon, Gerry had known that the statement was no more than a dry attempt at humor. The old archivist had never been particularly good at making jokes.

She’d lent him a number of statements to read through in preparation for this trip, though as always, there was only so much he could learn from them. People’s words could be vague and clumsy when they were frightened. Well, there was that, and then there was his extraordinary talent for never actually doing the assigned reading until the last possible minute. The books were being printed somewhere in Greenland, and the pages had an inconvenient habit of spontaneously combusting. That was the most information that Gerry had managed to retain while skimming the documents last night. 

Sending him off to handle the matter on his own hadn’t been Gertrude’s first choice. In fact, up until a few days earlier, she’d fully intended to come with him. Unfortunately, something bigger than an exploding book had caught her attention, and she’d had to step out. She had yet to tell Gerry what that  _ something _ was. It got on his nerves, how close-handed Gertrude could be at times, but in the grander scheme of things, she probably had some reason to be. In the short time he’d been working with her, he’d learned that the archivist never did things without a reason. Gertrude didn’t want him distracted, most likely. She needed him sharp and focused, not thinking about whatever mess he’d inevitably come back to when he returned to London. And Gertrude was confident, she’d assured him, that he could handle this particular case on his own. 

At least he wouldn’t have to worry about paying the travel expenses. He wasn’t an official Institute Employee (and had no plans to ever become one), so Gertrude couldn’t legally cover him if they weren’t traveling together. But she had managed to call in a last-minute favor and snag him free passage on a ship that happened to be going exactly where he needed to be. It was a pint-sized cargo vessel, manned by a crew that, surprisingly, hardly seemed dodgy at all. Apparently the captain was an old acquaintance of Gertrude’s, someone who she’d helped out of a supernatural bind some years back, whose information she’d kept over the years in case she ever needed to call in a favor. Gerry didn’t know much more than that; he hadn’t been included in the negotiations, and as a result he didn’t get a chance to meet the man in question. But if he was on good terms with Gertrude, and if he was willing to take on an extra passenger out of sheer scout’s honor, then he couldn’t be _too_ bad.

Now Gerry was alone in the harbor at dawn, as promised, waiting for someone to give him the word that he was allowed to board. He slouched on top of an empty wooden crate, leaning back against a grimy brick wall as he watched the crew of strangers load boxes onto an arrangement of cranes and conveyor belts that ferried them into the ship’s open sides. Its name was the  _ S.S. Melville _ , according to the peeling black letters plastered along the edge of the bow.

The  _ Melville _ itself was a spartan, borderline militaristic thing, all faded paint and exposed metal. It looked like a tetanus infection waiting to happen, but that was something that Gerry knew how to deal with. He could rough it when he had to. Honestly, it might have made Gerry  _ more _ uncomfortable if he’d tried to pretend that this trip would be anything less than miserable. Any job that required long-distance travel generally was.

With nothing better to do at the moment, Gerry fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He pinched the filter between his teeth while he flicked open his lighter. It took a few tries to get a flame to actually come to life. It was a grey and dreary morning, the mist of last night’s rain still heavy in the air. As he held the end of his cigarette to the trembling flame, Gerry reminded himself to be grateful that he’d had the sense not to bother straightening his hair that morning. The sun was barely over the horizon, but the sluggish August heat was already starting to set in. If the captain had asked him to meet up here any later than dawn, he probably would have melted into a puddle right there on the concrete dock. As it was, he’d spent almost an hour and a half just sitting and waiting for things to get moving. Just his luck that he would show up on time only for the crew to be behind schedule.

Finally the tip of the cigarette glowed red, and he pulled a long draught of smoke into his lungs. There was too much of it for just one breath, and it burned the back of his throat, but it felt good to be breathing something dry for once.

“Oi!” a gruff voice called to him from further down the dock. “Stowaway! Give us a hand over here, will ya?” After half a conversation and a handshake, Gerry was sure he could recognize Captain Clark Bishop’s voice anywhere. The man had a very distinctive sound to him. His voice was like a b-movie actor’s idea of what the weathered old captain of a shipping vessel should sound like.

A long sigh rose from Gerry’s mouth in a cloud of smoke.  _ Of course _ , as soon as he started getting comfortable. The captain had already assigned him a nickname too. He had a few choice words in mind about that, but he decided to keep them to himself. May as well play nice, since the crew was so willing to do the same for him. He stubbed out his nigh-unsmoked cigarette against the wall and slid it back into his pocket before getting up and slinging the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder. It looked like he’d be spending the morning a little busier than he’d expected. Just because Gertrude had snagged him passage without payment didn’t mean that this ride on their ship was going to be  _ completely _ free.

“You could have left the bag where it was, lad,” Captain Bishop remarked as Gerry made his way to the edge of the dock. The captain was a large, solid man, probably in his fifties, given the generous sprinkle of grey in his hair and beard. And the fact that Gertrude had known him long enough to consider him an “acquaintance.” Gerry knew better than most that she kept few friends.

“I’d rather keep it where I can see it,” Gerry tersely replied. He tried to pour as much urgency into the words as he could, taking care not to look around at the crew while he said them. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them (he didn’t, not completely, but that was hardly their fault). The problem was that there were a few things Gertrude had sent with him that, in the wrong hands, could spell disaster for a lot more than just his mission.

“That’s fine, then. Gertrude did warn me about the, uh, sensitive items,” Captain Bishop assured him.  _ Good, he understands _ , Gerry thought to himself. “For now, just get to moving these onboard, would ya?” He brought one broad, dry hand down on top of a stack of cardboard boxes. 

Gerry nodded and set himself to the task without another word. He figured if he lent a hand now, that would get this godforsaken boat out to sea a little faster. The humid air was starting to grow hotter, and it only got worse as the minutes dragged onward. He kept at it anyway, following Captain Bishop’s basic instructions, messing about with tape and labels and hauling boxes from one belt or crane to another. Gerry scraped his hair back into a ponytail, peeling away a few sweat-drenched strands that had become plastered to his skin. He could practically feel his hair growing frizzy, and after only twenty minutes he needed to shed his leather jacket and leave it draped over his duffel bag. Keeping it nearby had been a good idea, given some of the looks the crew was shooting in his direction. He couldn’t blame them, he supposed. He looked ridiculously out of place here, and Gertrude wouldn’t have told anyone other than Captain Bishop  _ why _ Gerry needed to get to Greenland on such short notice. It was only natural for them to be suspicious. Natural or not, the very last thing he needed was for any of them to go rifling through his bag.

Within an hour, the dock was cleared of cargo, and the warm, wet discomfort of the day had settled squarely over everything. Gerry’s shirt clung to his chest and back, and he took a labored breath before lifting the strap of his duffel bag back over his shoulder. He scratched at the back of his neck, and his hand came away damp. He disgruntledly wiped it off on his jeans. He’d always hated summer for this exact reason. Hopefully it would be cooler once they got out to sea. 

Captain Bishop approached him before long. “Thanks for that, Gerard,” he said. “The old bird  _ did _ say you could make yourself useful. Must say, you’re stronger than you look.”

Gerry absently hummed in agreement. “So, am I allowed to see my sleeping arrangements yet, or...”

“Impatient one, aren’t ya?” the captain replied. He offered Gerry a friendly half-smile. “Sure. Go on ahead. Kristian here will show you.” 

The captain landed one hand on the shoulder of a wiry, redheaded man who, until then, had been pacing the dock and fussing over a clipboard. He jumped in surprise at the sound of his own name, then turned to take note of the two men standing behind him. The captain gave him a nod, and he spoke up in a nervous, lilting voice. “Ah... yes, yes, right. Follow me. What was your name, again?”

“Gerard.” He may as well tell as many people his name as possible, before Captain Bishop convinced the rest of the crew his name was _stowaway_.

“Gerard. Right. Good to meet you.” Kristian’s voice had an odd accent to it, a soft and subdued inflection that seemed to curl up around the edges of his words. Gerry tried to place it, sure he must have heard it somewhere before. 

_ Icelandic. _

Gerry hissed under his breath as the information slid suddenly into his head. It had come in sharper than usual, slicing right into his consciousness like a hot knife. And to think that he’d been doing so well blocking it out lately.

“You alright?” Kristian asked, his eyebrows raised. He’d stopped halfway up the gangplank and turned around to fix his gaze on Gerry. 

It took a second for Gerry to become aware of the face he was making, his eyebrows pinched together and eyes squinted like he was staring into the sun. He blinked and brought a hand up to rub at the base of his skull, the spot where he’d felt the Eye force its information into his brain. “Yeah, m’fine,” he mumbled. “I just get headaches sometimes. It’s nothing.” There was something nervous about Kristian that Gerry was almost sure had nothing to do with him. He might be a naturally anxious person. Or maybe this was merely Kristian’s first time working on a cargo vessel. 

_ No, it isn’t. _

Gerry gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore the knowledge that had come from nowhere.

“Hm. You sure about that?” Kristian pressed. “You know, I read a story once about a man who was having headaches for months on end. He got into a car accident, cracked his skull open like an egg. When he got rushed to the hospital, you know what the doctors found? A tumor, the size of a  _ golf ball _ . And the guy said he never even suspected it was there.”

“That’s one hell of an assumption to make from a headache.”

“Oh. Well, forgive my concern.” Kristian’s voice stammered like he was trying to laugh off his weird remarks. “Things you read can have a real way of getting into your head, you know?”

Gerry huffed a small, knowing laugh to ease the tension. “Yeah, I do.”

“I tend to do a lot of reading on shore leave,” Kristian rambled as he turned around and kept walking. “I’m into current events, mostly. True crime and the like, too. Other thing I read a few weeks back, about some Norwegian billionaire who built his own submarine just to lure a reporter in there and murder her. Then he sank the whole thing trying to hide the body.” He glanced back at Gerry as he ducked through a doorway into a rusty spiral staircase. “Wild things that people do in this world. Really wild things. The truth is stranger than fiction, that’s what I think.”

Gerry hummed in agreement, almost listening. He was busy constructing a mental map of the ship’s corridors as Kristian led him through one after another. It would probably be best if he could know his way around without a guide. While he memorized, Kristian prattled on.

“I’ve had people tell me I spend too much time reading. Keeps me from going out, meeting people and the like. I’ve never understood why they thought it was a problem, though. I like that it gives me something to talk about when I  _ do _ meet people. Good for starting conversations and all that. Really, if I’m not reading something, I feel like I haven’t got much else going on.” 

“I could have guessed.”

Again, Kristian paused.  _ Really _ paused. When he glanced back at Gerry this time, he held still long enough to meet his eyes.. “W-what makes you say that?”

“You’re not especially good at small talk.” At that, Kristian’s face drew tight with embarrassment, and he looked away, leaning his shoulder against the wall of boxes beside them. Gerry could see the beginnings of an apology on his face. “It’s fine,” he cut in. “Neither am I.”

“Ah.” The tension melted off of Kristian, and he quickly recomposed himself. “In that case...” He looked around at the sizable gap between stacks of containers. “Looks like this is your spot.”

“Cool.” Gerry shrugged off the strap of his duffel bag and let it hit the floor. Gertrude had specifically requested that he have his space to himself, and given that, it seemed like an obvious tradeoff that Captain Bishop wouldn’t be able to place him in an actual bunk. Sure, he was sleeping in a cargo hold, but that was fine with him. He only had to put up with this for a few short days, and his standards were always significantly lower when Gertrude wasn’t with him.

“Living areas are right up the stairs over there,” Kristian informed him, pointing towards the far end of the hold. “That’s where you’ll find bathrooms, dining hall, pretty much anything you’ll need. I can point you to the linen closet, if you like. So you can get some pillows to put down here and all.”

“I think I can figure it out on my own,” Gerry assured him. “Thanks for showing me in.” With that, he turned his back to Kristian and crouched down to unzip his duffel bag.

Gerry fully expected that Kristian would leave then. Giving thanks and proceeding to ignore was the most polite way he knew how to tell a person to fuck off. The file folders at the bottom of his bag were calling to him. He’d hardly understood anything from his initial pass on the statements Gertrude had sent with him. Served him right for thinking he could cram it all in the night before the trip. He’d at least have a little more time to analyze them while the ship was at sea, and he’d prefer not to have an audience while he did that. But for all the time he spent pretending to be fascinated by the clothes he’d packed, Kristian didn’t make any attempt to walk away. Gerry could feel his blank stare boring into the back of his head.

Gerry cast a measured glare over his shoulder. “You need something?” 

“N-no,” Kristian stammered. He tensed a little, looking almost like he was embarrassed again, but his staring didn’t stop. 

“Then why are you still here? Don’t you have a job to do right now?”

“I’m not on navigation, and driving this thing is up to the captain. I don’t have much on the agenda unless something goes wrong with the engine.” 

“Okay...” Gerry turned around to face Kristian directly. “And you’re still here... why?”

“I’m just curious is all.” 

“What about?”

“ _ You _ . Why are you here?” Kristian pressed. “Some old lady shows up to strike a bargain with the captain a few days before a routine trip, and a couple days after, you’re here, and for some reason everyone’s fine with it?” There was a sudden bite in Kristian’s voice, just accusatory enough to leave Gerry uneasy. And he was still staring. Gerry wished he would look somewhere else, even for a second. At the very least he could  _ blink _ .

“He and Gertrude go back a few years. Think of this as returning a favor for an old friend.” 

“And you?”

“I’m here on her behalf, so whatever good will he’s got for her, he’s got for me as well. He’s paying her back through me. That enough of an answer for you?”

It clearly wasn’t. Kristian stood with his arms crossed tight over his chest, his lips pressed into a stern line. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you  _ here _ ?”

“Now  _ that _ ,” Gerry huffed as he stood up, “is confidential information. I don’t want to put either of us at risk by telling you.”

“That doesn’t exactly  _ explain _ anything.”

“Okay.” Gerry sighed, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Listen, Kristian. I know this is a weird situation. Honestly, it is for the both of us. But you’ve got to understand, the reason I’m here has got nothing to do with you. I’m just in it for the travel, and I don’t want to cause any trouble. The captain understands that, and it seems like nobody else has got a problem with it.”

Kristian’s face pinched into a confused frown. “So... What are you? Like, a secret agent or–”

“If that’s what’ll help you get to sleep tonight,” Gerry cut him off. He nudged his duffel bag into a corner with his foot. “Part of the deal was that I stay out of the crew’s hair as much as I can. As long as you’re here, that _technically_ counts as me being disruptive and you being distracted. Now are you gonna stand there all day and get us both in trouble, or will you leave me alone so I can hold up my end of this bargain?”

Gerry watched Kristian grind his teeth for a second before he opened his mouth, then quickly shut it again before whatever he was planning on saying slipped out. Instead, he let his arms fall slack at his sides and backed away. “Fine,” he muttered, stepping back towards the opening between stacks of boxes. “Sorry to bother you, Gerard.”

“I’m sure you are,” Gerry said under his breath. Whether Kristian could hear him or not, he no longer especially cared. He wasn’t here to make friends with anyone, and from what he could gather, neither was Kristian. 

_ It’s his first time working with this crew _ . The information stuck Gerry like a pin in the base of his neck, with even less warning than last time. 

“That isn’t going to help me,” he mumbled through his teeth. He let himself sink down onto a low shelf of sturdy boxes and buried his hands into his duffel bag, trying to ignore the needling sensation of random unsolicited facts.

_ He’s a transfer from another company _ .

Gerry tensed again, but only for a second before he forced himself to relax. He took a deep breath and held it for a second, trying to pull himself together and pretend he didn’t care about the information being drip-fed into his brain. This wasn’t anything new for him. The Eye had been relentless with him for years. He knew it wanted him, and badly enough to have reduced itself to bribing him. For some reason it thought that it could win him over by dropping hints into his brain at the least convenient of times. He could push them aside most of the time. He preferred to go about his work honestly. Unless his life was in danger, the Eye rarely told him anything useful anyway. 

Whenever he managed to shut it up, it always came back before long, and always twice as vicious. He’d been so good keeping it out lately. _So_ good, and for a short while he'd almost felt normal. But nothing nice lasts forever. Not in a life like Gerry’s.

He held out for a second longer, giving Kristian a few more seconds to disappear from his periphery before digging past his clothes and unearthing the thick stack of manila folders that Gertrude had given him. He set them aside in a neat pile, counting out nine folders, each with a thin packet of papers stapled inside. Mixed in alongside them was a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen jammed haphazardly into the binding. He dug that out and set it next to the folders. With the statements and his notes all in order, Gerry reached back into the bag and fished around for one last thing. A small paperback book. 

Gertrude had sent him off with a copy of  _ The Flashpaper Affair _ , one of the few that had survived long enough to be brought in as evidence. The book was a far cry from the sort that Gerry was more accustomed to handling. It wasn’t anything large, ancient or impressive;  _ The Flashpaper Affair _ was new, cheaply printed, novella-sized, and had a red-orange laminated cover decorated by some sloppy, obviously rushed vector art. The solid shapes of bland color depicted something that was probably supposed to look like a hand pinching a lit match between its fingers.

Gerry set the book aside and made up his mind not to look at it again until he’d finished his second pass of the statements. Thumbing through the pages, he pondered how strange it was that such an unimposing book had such a track record. Of course, there were several cases documented in the archives that involved repeat offenders. But the actors in most of those were people, or monsters, or if they _had_ to involve inanimate objects, ones that were old and storied and expensive. He wasn’t in any place to evaluate this thing’s capacity for destruction, though. He’d been dealing with the supernatural long enough to know that first impressions were rarely accurate. That was the whole reason people did research. Gerry cracked open the first folder in the pile and started to read.

He took considerably more time on the second read-through, actually analyzing the transcribed events and remembering to take notes. Some parts he recalled from the night before, and other details felt fresh, letting him know there was plenty that he’d missed or forgotten from his first pass. As he read, he kept his notebook open and laid out flat on one leg, pausing every now and then to scribble down anything that sounded important. Locations, unifying details, anything that might point to a singular place of origin for the book. 

Combing through one statement after another started to clear up the picture in Gerry’s head. According to these collected cases, there were numerous copies of  _ The Flashpaper Affair _ floating around England, Scotland, and a handful of other places in the surrounding area. It was a recent artifact, encounters with it dating back only three years, but the speed at which this book was making an impact was nothing short of alarming. The book’s painfully bland appearance made it easy to mistake for a pulpy murder-mystery novel, and even easier to pick up by accident. The books turned up unannounced on the shelves of drugstores, groceries and bookshops. One statement claimed that the book had been given to the witness by a friend who clearly hadn’t bothered to finish reading it. The book had a barcode on its back cover, but it didn’t bring up a price when scanned at a register. Half the people who gave statements admitted to stealing the book right off the shelf where they’d found it, assuming it was worthless and wouldn’t be missed. 

If ignored or left to gather dust on a shelf, _The Flashpaper Affair_ was a pretty harmless object. Problems only arose when people tried to read it. According to the statements of people who’d read the novella firsthand, the first half of the story was a pretty cut-and-dry crime thriller about some white-bread hero detective investigating mysterious cases of arson. Then came a certain passage. No one seemed to remember exactly what it said, or where exactly in the book it was printed. The closest anyone came was “about halfway through.” Reading this passage (out loud or silently, it didn’t seem to make a difference) apparently caused the book’s pages to burst into raging, uncontrollable flames. Most readers reported dropping the book and running. Those who tried to fight the fire found it impossible to put out, impervious to water, fire extinguishers, wet dish towels or anything else that any of the witnesses had tried to use against it. The fire would then proceed to tear through everything it could reach, leaving nothing but ash behind.

In the nine statements Gerry read,  _ The Flashpaper Affaid _ had, thus far, taken down three houses, the top two floors of an apartment complex, half a library wing, and at least seven people (whose bodies were intact enough to be identified). And these were just the  _ recorded _ instances. Nearly every witness felt sure that there were more copies of  _ The Flashpaper Affair _ out there, somewhere, waiting for another unsuspecting person to pick them up and read that godforsaken passage. Nobody had mentioned any bookplates on the inside front cover. So this wasn’t a Leitner he was dealing with, but it was something similar enough to be just as dangerous.

Gerry clicked his pen as he combed through the closing sentences of the last statement in the pile. There were no more notes to be taken, at least for now; he curled up against the boxes and pored over what he’d written down. Not many witnesses looked at the edition notice, but the few who did all reported seeing different information in every copy of the book. The name of the publisher was always the same:  _ Burning Hand Press _ , which yielded no results from Google, and for all intents and purposes didn’t seem to be an actual licensed company. Not to mention that the publication date and city of origin kept on changing. One said the book was printed in Nuuk, another in Sisimiut, and another claiming the office of Burning Hand Press was in Ilulissat.

The copy that Gertrude had lent him was, apparently, printed in Taliisaq.

Gerry glanced sideways at the paperback book, sitting patiently underneath a pile of read-through statements. The book had  _ Desolation _ written all over it, both literally and figuratively. The pages were taped shut, thank fuck, except for a few near the front that left only the flyleaves, edition notice and cover page exposed. It was supposed to help him track down the source of the books, and he’d taken it at Gertrude’s insistence. That was all. 

He would have been lying to himself, though, if he didn’t admit his own itching curiosity to rip the tape away and see those cursed pages for himself. Anyone who came across it might feel the same. That was what books were supposed to do, right? Entice people to read them?

But most people didn’t know the danger that came with reading this particular novella. Most people didn’t specifically crave the frightening spark of arcane fire that it held in its pages. The statement givers certainly hadn’t known what they had picked up. Gerry  _ did _ , and maybe that was worse. As hard as he tried to keep from bending to the Eye’s will, it could be very persuasive at times. 

He reached out towards the book and grasped it gently by its spine, settling it in his hands with the same reverence as he used for ancient tomes. He ran the pad of his thumb along the sealed pages. The nail caught on the edge of the tape, and he felt a twitch in the ligaments of his hand, aching to peel it back.

_ Nope _ , he thought decisively.  _ We are  _ not _ doing this. _

Gerry flipped the untaped pages open and ripped the title page out of the binding, taking the edition notice with it. The paper gave a little hiss of resistance, but the flimsy glue in the binding came apart easily. The publication info was the only thing he needed from the book, and the rest could get thrown overboard, as far as he cared. The more he thought about it, the less that sounded like a bad idea. He didn’t need it around. He could convince himself that he didn’t want it, if he worked hard enough. It was nothing more than a distraction, not to mention a hazard. Gertrude would probably have an axe to grind with him for tampering with evidence, but it wasn’t like she was here to stop him.

In nearly the same moment as the thought crossed his mind, a dull pain angrily thrummed to life inside his head. It had been brewing for a while, and he’d ignored it, but it seemed to have chosen now to really rear its head and attack. Gerry hissed, keeling over forward and leaning on his knees. His hands went to the back of his head and quickly began tugging at the elastic that kept his hair tied back.

His hair fell free in loose, jet-black waves, hanging in his face as he drew one long inhale after another, rubbing at his scalp and waiting for the ache to subside. Had he tied his hair too tight? It had happened before. Or maybe this was just another case of him getting so lost in research that he let his neck crumble under the weight of his head. The pain fluttered in and out, showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. He tipped his head back and rolled his neck, hoping that it would somehow help. As he could have predicted, it didn’t. 

In a way, he hadn’t been lying to Kristian earlier. Not completely. Much like the Eye’s constant intrusions of information, random headaches were also nothing new to Gerry. 

He’d at least thought ahead enough to come prepared. He delved a hand into the duffel bag, wriggling it down right next to the spot where he’d kept the statements. His fingers wrapped around a half-full travel-size bottle of store brand painkillers. He shook out three into his hand and swallowed them dry. It was a touch overkill, he knew, but the customary two pills usually didn’t cut it for dulling his own personal brand of pain. Some days, it took even more, landing him in the long, agonizing cycle of taking pills, waiting, his head staunchly refusing to stop pounding and eventually taking more pills. His personal record was eight before the pain let up, and he sincerely hoped he’d never beat it. His liver could only take so much abuse. 

Whenever the pain took hold of him, there wasn’t much he could do to make himself comfortable, but there were small things that he could at least pretend were helpful. He dropped _The Flashpaper Affair_ onto the floor and kicked it aside, then set the statement pile and his notebook on top of his bag. He then laid back on the boxes and threw his leather jacket over his face. For a few minutes, he did his best to focus on nothing but the comfortable darkness and his own familiar smell. Slowly, the pain started to fade, and Gerry breathed a sigh of relief. His brain had decided to take it easy on him today.

It took him a moment to convince himself to sit up. He quickly went about setting the statements all back into their proper folders, then shuffling his belongings around in his bag and stowing them neatly in the bottom, where anyone who wanted to filch them would have to dig through a mountain of leather and studs first. It wasn’t foolproof by any means, but it was the best he could do at the moment. He hoped that no one in the crew was the curious type. Kristian might have been. That was something he’d need to talk to Captain Bishop about. For the moment, though, this would have to do. He had a particularly annoying paperback that desperately needed to be drowned. Gerry picked up  _ The Flashpaper Affair  _ and started towards the stairs out of the cargo hold. 

“Oh. Hey there, stowaway.” A woman was standing halfway down the stairs. If she hadn’t been looking past the clipboard in her hands, she might have run directly into Gerry. 

“Hi,” he awkwardly replied.

“The captain just sent me down to get you. The crew is on their break for lunch and he wants you to join.”

“He does?” Gerry wasn’t surprised. Captain Bishop definitely seemed to be the fast-friendly type. His crew must have been on the same page, if he’d gotten them all on board with Gerry’s fun little nickname this fast. 

“Yeah. He wants to catch up on all the details of his old friend.”

Gerry shrugged, unsure how Gertrude might have reacted to Bishop calling her  _ his old friend _ . “Not much to tell, I’m afraid.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to hear,” she assured him as she turned around and started up the stairs. “You’ll want to get in sooner rather than later. There’s a draft in the dining hall, and it makes food go cold like nobody’s business.”

“I’ll follow you, then.” 

As she led him upstairs, he tucked _The Flashpaper Affair_ into a lining pocket of his jacket. So he couldn’t get rid of it just yet. That was fine. As long as he got rid of it at _some_ point, he would probably be fine.

* * *

The beach was a rocky and quiet place. Sand closer to gravel dug up into soft, wet skin where gravity pressed the two together. The sky above moved like unmixed paint, one shade of grey oozing languidly into another as heat seeped through layer upon layer of cloud. The air was warm and humid, feeling viscous in the nose and on the tongue. It tasted like dirt and salt. 

He was lying on his side, an arm thrown across his eyes to hide his face from the sun. It wasn’t that the light bothered him. His arm was fixed in place, limp as a cluster of wet kelp. His face was numb, his eyes sore and sinking backwards into their sockets. No, it wasn’t the light, nor was it the heat, though neither were doing much to help him keep it together. If it were the dead of winter or dead of night, his eyes still would have been struggling to stay open.

Beside him, the sand crunched, and he heard Helen’s body inching closer to him. A wave rose and crashed into the rolling surf, coming up to wash over both of them. Cool and slippery cut through the density of hot air and drying sand. One roll over, and he felt the gentle scrape of scales nudging up against his side. 

“Hey,” she mumbled, straining to prop herself up on one elbow. Just knowing she was holding herself up made his shoulders ache with sympathy. He gave a low whine, and she nudged him again. “What are you thinking about?”

The question wriggled into his ears and fluttered in his head like a little lost fish. He was genuinely unsure how to answer it.

It was a massive effort to remove his arm and peel his eyes open, but he somehow managed to do it. He sprawled out flat on his back, his arms falling heavily into the sand above his head. His spine arched, then fell slack again under its own weight. He fixed his gaze on Helen, and a smile spread slowly across her face, lips pulling back over a row of sharp teeth. A second’s space held the two of them together, a net of a moment that had captured them both. Then as soon as it was noticed, it faded into the background and was forgotten. Another wave washed across the sand and lapped at the end of his tail, leaving foam to bubble idly on his fins.

“Well?” Helen asked again. “What are you thinking about?”

He pulled a draught of air into his lungs and felt his ribs struggling to open up. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. The words felt clumsy and too solid for his mouth. “Something, probably. But it could just as easily have been nothing at all.”

Helen laughed and her limbs gave out, slumping her body back down into the sand. The sound of her voice shattered through the air, specks of glitter made from sound. “I was thinking about the cliffs. How far up do you think they go?”

He tipped his head back, straining his neck to look behind him. Some distance away, a tall, jagged face of rock rose up from the sand. He blinked, realizing that he hadn’t even noticed them until Helen had pointed them out. “Hm. I don’t know.”

“It’s quiet out here,” Helen remarked. “Probably no one up there.”

“Probably.”

“Do you wonder how far we are from anyone right now?”

“I don’t really see the point in it.”

Helen hummed, and he felt the turn of her thoughts on the subject. A seagull screamed somewhere above them. With an afterthought, Helen’s fingers found his wrist, and with a slow movement, she pulled his arm down and rested her head on the bend of his elbow. The length of her tail wrapped gingerly around his. “You’re running slow today. Is something wrong?”

His eyes squeezed shut again. “You’re asking more questions than usual.”

“I  _ always _ ask questions,” Helen said. “You don’t  _ have _ to answer them if you really don’t want to.”

But he _did_ want to. He couldn’t explain why, but he did. It felt pleasant, having something to say when Helen asked him to say it. Helen still liked to talk, which he knew was unusual. Talking was something they couldn’t do when they were in the water.

It wasn’t as if they couldn’t understand each other in other ways. They could function just fine without exchanging any words at all, tones and noise and shapes and bodies telling them all they really needed to know. That was the way the others had lived, but Helen was different. She was what she was, but she had not been that way for all that long, however long  _ that _ was. She still liked words, and still liked to exchange them. It wasn’t until she’d reminded him that he realized he liked them as well. Words were funny things, sharp edges that softened awkwardly around his lips and teeth. He was out of practice, but he did his best to use them anyway. He didn’t know how he’d forgotten that. Maybe because before Helen, he hadn’t ever used them. The others had never bothered leaving the water to talk like Helen did. 

And there were others, at one time. He couldn’t remember very much about them at all, but he knew that none of them had been anything like Helen. They had been in the water so much longer than him. Helen hadn’t, which was why she talked. He wondered if they were all still the same now, wherever they were, whatever they were up to. If they still existed at all. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d last seen them. At least long enough for them to almost disappear, but not long enough for them to be gone completely. If he saw them again, he might never be sure if they were the ones he’d known before or other others, entirely separate despite how same they might be. 

Slowly, he became aware of just how long he’d been silent. He still felt the weight of Helen’s head on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” she asked.

“I’m not being very interesting right now, am I?”

Helen laughed again and inched a little closer, pressing her forehead into his cheek. “It isn’t your job to be interesting for me.”

He doubted that, because if that wasn’t his job, then he didn’t know what his job  _ was _ . He sighed, just to feel his ribs stretch again, and felt Helen’s long fingers rasping through his hair. 

“Are you sad?” she gently asked.

He blinked, staring up at the clouds. “How would I know if I was?”

She shrugged, and he felt the movement like it was his own. “You would just  _ know _ ,” she replied. “I remember being sad. It was awful. It’s like a big, heavy thing that settles all over you. It turns the whole world dull and makes it hard to breathe.”

Now it was his turn to laugh. His voice crumbled in the air just like Helen’s. “If that’s how it works, then I must be sad every time I follow you out of the water.”

“That’s  _ different _ . That’s physical. Sadness is... it’s more abstract than that.” Helen paused, then her laugh rippled through his ears. “It’s funny. You’d think that living like this, I’d be able to explain it easier. Maybe I could, if I tried, but... I understand it. I do, but when I try to speak it out loud, it all just... falls away.” She sat up again to look down at him. That posture must have made her dizzy. “You really don’t know how it feels to be sad anymore?”

He was silent for a while, thinking. Nobody had asked him something like that in a while. Maybe  _ ever _ . “I don’t think I do. Maybe I never did.”

“Mm.” Helen leaned back on her elbows and tossed her hair over her shoulder, letting her dark curls trail into the sand. “That sounds like a lovely existence. I haven’t felt sad in a long time, and I’d be glad to never feel that way again.”

He could think of nothing worthwhile to say in response, so said nothing and went on quietly lying in the sand. He watched Helen stretching herself out, if only to have something to look at. Watching Helen was one of his favorite things to do. It made him remember what he’d missed when he was alone, and how nice it was that he wasn’t alone anymore. 

“Are you thinking something now?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“It  _ is _ difficult out here, isn’t it?”

“Either that, or thinking is all you  _ can _ do.”

“But you’re not thinking.” Her eyes rested on him. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, no longer totally sure what the words meant. 

“Don’t be.” Her consciousness curled up into the gaps left in his own. She felt kind, shapeless and warm. He fell back into watching her, and she was content to do the same. A seagull screamed again, still far above them.

Helen’s skin glowed golden-brown against the dull beige of the sand. Her scales gleamed with an oil-slick brilliance, bright gold bleeding into violet and teal over the curves of her tail. Helen had taken so easily to being what she was. For as much as she liked to beach herself and talk using words, she did well in the water. Better than he did. So much better. There was a strange beauty to what she was, and she was aware of it, just as much as he was aware of her. 

He did think Helen was beautiful, and he thought it often, but as much as they shared, all the things her mind did on its own had nothing to do with him. They were steeped in the same sentiments most of the time, but Helen’s feelings about herself were her own more than they were his. She loved her tail and her claws and her voice. He could sense it, and sense it in himself in all the places and ways that the two of them were bound together. 

And Helen thought that  _ he _ was beautiful, too. He knew it in himself, and he knew because she liked to tell him. At some point, he vaguely recalled, he’d supposed that it was just a factor of what they were. He and Helen were the same sort of creature, tied to each other with the same twisted strings of something neither of them could name. He had never known what to call it, and neither did Helen, but they knew it was there all the same. The thing was great, convoluted and powerful, and they were bound to it somehow, and through it they were bound to each other. It had made him, and it had made Helen. It had given them their claws and voices to feed it and themselves. When they fed, it fed too, and it told them how to stay alive, in its own indistinct way. He never thought about the details of how any of it worked. Helen once did, but she didn’t anymore.

The great, mysterious thing had made them into the same creature in all the ways that mattered. Their bodies had the same basic shape, long and lithe and fluid. The boundaries between them were flexible, and Helen’s consciousness occupied his head as much as his drifted into hers. But he was different from her, if only in the smallest, most inconsequential ways. It was those differences that Helen liked to point out to him. He gave her a break from herself, so she said. And he supposed she extended the same favor to him. Helen’s awareness had brought his own to the surface, and she reminded him to look at himself and remember what he was.

He was deathly pale compared to her. Every inch of skin he could see looked cold and bloodless, like the barren landscape of a place he couldn’t quite remember. His arms were covered in small tan specks, and from what he could see of his hair, it looked worn and faded compared to Helen’s. It twisted differently, in loose and tangled ringlets, nearly the same color as the sand where they rested. His tail was like Helen’s too, but just different enough to not be the same; colors bled into one another with the same oil-slick patterns that changed under the light, but where Helen’s scales gleamed gold into green, his were a soft, cool grey, like an overcast sky ripped through with flashes of green and blue.  _ Prismatic _ was what Helen called it. He liked the sound of that word, and every now and again he asked her to remind him what it meant. 

As he stared at the sky, a speck of white drifted across his vision. A seagull screamed again. It could have been the same one, circling them like two dying fish, waiting for them to quit squirming so it could swoop down and begin pecking at their flesh. It wouldn’t find much to feed on, not with them. Not as long as it was meat that the stupid creature was hoping for.

Next to him, Helen’s presence ruffled with interest, and the two of them watched the bird cross the sky, wheel around and settle on a low rocky ledge to stare down at the both of them with its flat yellow eyes. 

“It’s confused,” Helen speculated.

“It doesn’t like that we’re still moving,” he agreed.

“Hard to eat something that moves, isn’t it?.” 

He giggled at that, the sound of his voice shuddering and collapsing as it passed his lips. The seagull jumped, just close enough to get startled by the noise, and he felt a lazy coil of amusement at the sight of it. They watched the bird hurriedly adjust its wings and take off from its perch. As it glided away, he raised his head and sang out a single shrill note.

His voice slashed through the air, long and sharp. The seagull twitched, and it faltered a little in its flight. There was a scatter of shock in the air, falling with the tang of spilled salt. Helen smiled, and he felt the nudge of her amusement colliding with his own, curious and waiting for what came next. He pulled the song into a slight twist, and two harmonized notes ripped across empty space. The seagull’s wings went slack. It skated in a loose, sloppy circle, then turned over into a nosedive and began to plummet toward the water. 

Then, as quickly as he’d started to sing, he went silent. The bird fell for a second more before its senses wriggled back into shape. It screeched and flailed its wings, fear bubbling up from its consciousness before it plunged headfirst into the crest of a wave. Mindless, animal terror drifted from it in thin, dry flakes, kicking up like dust as it struggled to right itself. He closed his eyes and hummed, pressing his fingers into the wet sand and letting the vibration of his voice burrow through the ground, into the water and dissipate out. Helen drew in a slow breath, letting the fear dissolve into her, and he joined in, his mind ringing with fierce delight.

For a moment, Helen sighed and he sang, his voice pressing in on the seagull’s mind from all sides as it dragged itself deeper while trying to swim up. They basked in its panic, drinking in and savoring the frail, salty texture of its raw fear. It was nice, for a short while, but as the hum of his voice droned on, the taste began to grow muddy. It diluted and bled, and right away he stopped his song and opened his eyes, nearly choking on the tasteless melange of it. Helen shuddered with the same distaste, and in that moment, they both knew what had happened. The bird was alive, but no longer feeling. It had gone down too fast, and its consciousness had gone dark on them.

The satisfaction died with his song. One second, he was no longer tasting anything, and the next, he was collapsing inward. The air squeezed around him, the pull of the ground too strong. He tried to draw in another breath, and his chest seemed to lock up from the effort. The half-sigh left his lungs in a short huff of frustration, and he writhed against the sand, feeling a tightness beginning to draw itself up in the core of his body, like a strand of sinew left to fry in the sun. He felt weak, brittle and stiff. Beside himself, Helen felt the same.

“I’m tired of this place,” she remarked, her voice strained. “What about you?”

“I think so.” He had to consider the answer for a second, and why Helen had bothered asking. He felt her exhaustion at being on land as clearly as if it was his own. And there was quite a lot of his own, sinking his eyes into his skull and sprawling his body out softly on the sand. Helen did often say that he felt things rather loudly.

“We were doing something before this,” she went on. “I think it was important.” She went quiet, and he could feel her thinking, a slight pull and twist as her mind worked to iron out the details. 

His body drew tighter as he tried to think as well, staring out at the horizon like it would bring him answers. A feathered white body bobbed to the surface and its skinny webbed feet flapped at the air as it struggled to right itself. He tried to drink the fear in again, but there was nothing there for him anymore. The bland, mealy not-feeling was like an insult to his whole being, and he recoiled from it, his senses crumpling unpleasantly before his body drew tighter and tighter yet, complaining and begging, urging him toward.... _ something _ . The tension was coming from somewhere, inside or outside or possibly both at once. And it was all too familiar. The pain was ingrained into him, after however long he’d spent in the water. He hated it, but he knew it, and as much as he could, he trusted it. 

“I can’t remember the last time we fed,” Helen announced. ‘ _ Really _ fed.”

He looked over at her and struggled with another gasp of air. She looked at him like she was expecting him to speak, but like before, he had nothing to offer. 

“Can you?” she asked, though she knew the question was worthless. Out of the two of them, Helen seemed to be the only one capable of remembering anything offhand. She hadn’t been in the water as long as he had. The water had a tendency to take such things away over time. 

“Do you want to go?” he asked her when he finally had enough air in his lungs to do so. 

“We should.” Helen’s discomfort ran through him, piano wire between pearl beads. “If you hate how this feels as much as I do.” She eased herself up onto her forearms and began to inch herself backwards toward the water. 

He tried to do the same, though his body wasn’t inclined to cooperate. His arms shook as he strained to roll himself over, and as soon as he was facedown and flat on the sand again, his whole form seemed to melt into it. He collapsed for a minute before another wave swept up over the sand and pooled underneath him. The water floated and pulled, softly dragging him backwards. He followed it, and followed Helen’s nudges towards the cool, welcoming grasp of the tide. As soon as the water was deep enough, he let it wash over his body and take him in. 

The relief of returning was immediate. Cold twisted his senses back into shape, and just as suddenly he was floating, suspended easily between the wavering surface of the water and the rippled seabed. The water held him in a way that air simply couldn’t. Every last trace of the heaviness from the beach disappeared, and he felt awake and alive and  _ hungry _ . A flick of his tail kicked up clouds of sand as he ventured deeper. He slid through the water with a sense of purpose, though he didn’t know what direction to follow. The frail strands of want that he felt in his core propelled him forward. Helen crested next to him, her tail catching gold in the overcast sun. She glanced sideways, her gaze burrowed into his, and both at once thought. 

_ Do you hear that? _

_ I hear it. I feel it. _

Somewhere far ahead was a steady, thundering beat. It rolled steadily through the water, the vibrations of it dancing across his skin. He closed his eyes to listen, and like a compass in the pull of the earth, the noise pointed him forward. He opened his mouth to let the sound roll over his tongue, and things sprouted from the formless ether of his mind. A propeller. An engine. A ship.

_ A place to feed _ , Helen realized with him. 

He opened his eyes, and Helen was looking at him. She smiled, and he smiled back. They knew their direction, where and how to move. The rest would fall into place on its own. It always did, without thought or trying. The thing that made him and Helen had never failed them before. 

Together they turned their faces to the noise and swam.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder what ship they're gonna end up hunting down. Hm. It is a mystery.


	3. Author's Note

Well. I suppose this was probably a long time coming. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish writing this story.

Before I go on I have a request. Please, don’t start any discourse or fights over this. Don’t spread it to Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else. Keep all your sentiments reserved to the comments section of this chapter. I am not discontinuing this because of any discourse or harassment or anything like that. It was my own decision, and if there’s any vitriol that comes of it, I’d rather it be directed at me.

You might have gathered from my author notes that I’ve already struggled with posting this story and leaving it on AO3 at all. Not for any real reason, just due to some personal problems I’ve been having recently. I haven’t tried to make something this ambitious in a long time, and there were some other personal reasons for that which aren’t really worth getting into. In the past few years I haven’t been able to write much more than a single one-shot about every 6 months, usually angst or porn with little to no plot, and rarely producing more than one work for any particular fandom. I clearly haven’t been writing much, or very seriously, for a while.

Essentially, my point is that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this story and my AO3 account in general, and I’m genuinely not sure that writing fanfic is something I want to continue doing at all.

If you aren’t one of the exceedingly few people who have followed my works since I first got this account (8 years ago, holy shit), then you thankfully haven’t seen the heinous garbage that I created when I was in high school. Don’t look now, because a pretty large part of it has since been either orphaned or deleted entirely. I am really not proud of my track record in this field, and I made a lot of things when I was younger that I really wish I could erase now. I guess this is my way of saying that I’m considering deleting my AO3 entirely, because I really don’t know what more I can do here that won’t dig my own grave even deeper.

Not that I want to make this completely about me, because it genuinely isn’t. I’m trashing this story out of embarrassment and sympathy more than anything else. I knew going into it exactly what was wrong with this concept and the kind of damage it was capable of causing, and as much as I tried to warn people away, that doesn’t change the fact that I was still making the conscious decision to write and publish it. Like I said in the author’s note of my first chapter, I do not want my creations to hurt people, but it seems like lately that’s all I’m really capable of doing. I want to stop, in whatever way that I can, and right now it seems like giving up one stupid guilty pleasure is the best I can do.

I’m not going to insist that everybody who wasted their time and feelings on this story should feel the same way that I do. All I can really recommend is that if you want to keep engaging with content like this, tagged the way it is, that you do so critically and be aware of what it is you’re consuming and the way it might impact other people. I don’t want to become one of those “don’t like, don’t read” assholes because there’s a more responsible way to create content than just being injudiciously self-indulgent all the time and expecting audiences to simply deal with whatever trash you throw out into the abyss. That mode of thought isn’t fair and is completely inconsiderate toward people’s feelings. The fact that I didn’t try harder to be sympathetic to audiences who weren’t me or my personal circle of friends was frankly really stupid and shortsighted. I am 23 fucking years old, and I should know better. There is no excuse for the nature of my content or my behavior.

I want to offer a sincere apology to anyone who came across this story without full knowledge of what it was, anyone who was triggered by the content as it exists or the knowledge of the direction in which this story was meant to go. I should have thought harder about this before I published it and I’m sorry I can’t do more to make it up to you.

And to everyone who did read what exists of this story, if you are standing on the same ground I did when I decided to post it, you also deserve an apology. I’m sorry that I misled you and got your hopes up. If you were excited about the plotless mess that was the first 2 chapters of this work, I’m sorry that I can’t give you anything more, and that I’m leaving this work unfinished. What I said before applies here most strongly: if you want to keep consuming content like mine, be critical about it and be careful of who you tell about it. It is dark, harmful and distressing for a number of reasons, including the various and very real problems many people have with the two main ships, and those who don’t want anything to do with my work have every right to avoid it and not have it mentioned to them. I don’t want to cause any more damage than I already have, and I don’t want to see any retribution come out of this from any of my readers (however many of you there even are). Please, for fuck’s sake, don’t take this as an opportunity to harass people who don’t like the ships I planned to explore in this story. Keep your priorities in order. This is not something that is worth fighting about.

I don’t know how long this will be available to read, since, as I mentioned before, I might be deleting my entire account soon. If I do decide to leave this up, well... at least you’ll all know what happened.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this exists again. That's all there is to say anymore.


End file.
